51 research outputs found
Affective Images
No full textAffective Images examines both canonical and lesser-known photographs and films that address the struggle against apartheid and the new struggles that came into being in post-apartheid times. Marietta Kesting argues for a way of embodied seeing and complements this with feminist and queer film studies, history of photography, media theory, and cultural studies. Featuring in-depth discussions of photographs, films, and other visual documents, Kesting then situates them in broader historical contexts, such as cultural history and the history of black subjectivity and revolves the images around the intersection of race and gender. In its interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the recurrence of affective images of the past in a different way, including flashbacks, trauma, "white noise," and the return of the repressed. It draws its materials from photographers, filmmakers, and artists such as Ernest Cole, Simphiwe Nkwali, Terry Kurgan, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Adze Ugah, and the Center for Historical Reenactments
Affective Images
No full textAffective Images examines both canonical and lesser-known photographs and films that address the struggle against apartheid and the new struggles that came into being in post-apartheid times. Marietta Kesting argues for a way of embodied seeing and complements this with feminist and queer film studies, history of photography, media theory, and cultural studies. Featuring in-depth discussions of photographs, films, and other visual documents, Kesting then situates them in broader historical contexts, such as cultural history and the history of black subjectivity and revolves the images around the intersection of race and gender. In its interdisciplinary approach, this book explores the recurrence of affective images of the past in a different way, including flashbacks, trauma, "white noise," and the return of the repressed. It draws its materials from photographers, filmmakers, and artists such as Ernest Cole, Simphiwe Nkwali, Terry Kurgan, Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi, Adze Ugah, and the Center for Historical Reenactments
EDITION ANY BREEZE, ANY GRAIN OF LIGHT EIN GESPRÄCH ZWISCHEN SANDRA SCHÄFER & MARIETTA KESTING
No full textBreaking and Making Models
No full textPractically anything can be a model of or for something else. What characterizes models is rather their specific reductive relationality, which often promotes understanding but is always generative rather than merely representational. The essays in Breaking and Making Models engage with the normative and performative qualities of models, their aesthetic and political dimensions, and their world-making potentials. Bringing such perspectives into a broad interdisciplinary dialogue, this book explores ways to work creatively with models.Introduction | CHRISTOPH F. E. HOLZHEY, MARIETTA KESTING, AND CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 1-17TRANSFERRING MODELS BETWEEN THE ARTS AND THE SCIENCESModels as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny | ASTRID DEUBER-MANKOWSKY | 21-45Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking | JULIA SÁNCHEZ-DORADO | 47-77From Climate Model to Climate Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature | ROSS SHIELDS | 79-107The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum | MARIA DĘBIŃSKA | 109-130PERFORMING MODELSPersistence: Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’ | B CAMMINGA | 133-154The Statistical Cloud of Race: Lancelot Hogben’s Anti-Eugenics between Populations and Organisms | BEN WOODARD | 155-179Crises in Modelling: Articulations of the Romanian Labour Market in the Long 1990s | ALINA-SANDRA CUCU | 181-200Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present | ORIT HALPERN | 201-215Large Language Models, Parrots, and Children: Modelling Speech, Text, and Learning Processes | MARIETTA KESTING | 217-237MODELLING AT THE MARGINSModelling Institutions, Instituting Models: The Juridification of Politics and the Performative Power of Naming | NATASCIA TOSEL | 241-262Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage | MARTA ALEKSANDROWICZ | 263-285The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics | MARK ANTHONY CAYANAN | 287-321Towards a Genealogy of Moffie: Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African | RUTH RAMSDEN-KARELSE | 323-341ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsInde
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No full textJurgen Kesting, author of The Great Singers:
And Journalist Yrsa Stenius
Scale Critique and the Subject of Technoscience
No full textPost-structuralism argues for the dissolution of the modern subject, especially the subject’s individuality, interiority, and abstraction from embodiment. The subject is a knot in strings of language, driven by external and unconscious forces, less the free origin of ideas and actions than a site where bodies meet flows of information. For Felix Guattari, ‘rather than speak of the “subject”, we should perhaps speak of components of subjectification’ and distinguish between the concepts of the individual and subjectivity. If the subject of technoscience bound up with issues such as the authority of climate modelling is a processual subject in this sense, then how should one think the role of scaling and scale critique in its formation? How does scalar subjectification influence the politics of scientific truth in today’s context of corporate capitalism, anti-colonial critique, and post-truth media? This talk addresses the relationship between subject formation in contemporary technoscience and the theoretical problems of scale at work in ICI’s lecture series. Drawing on the ontology and media theory of Gilbert Simondon, Woods understands scientific subjectification in terms of a tension between at least two qualitatively different scales such as weather and climate. His central example is computational climate modelling — especially the use of grids, time steps, and parameters to establish a model’s resolution. In such knowledge-political contexts, scale theory and scale critique have taken the subject’s integrity for granted in their various ways of conceptualizing ‘the human scale’ and opposing it to the imperceptible, nonhuman phenomena that lie beyond it. One viable alternative can work with post-structuralist theories of subjectivity to complicate the relation between human and nonhuman scale domains. Derek Woods is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University in Canada. Woods works to create dialogue between the sciences and humanities for the sake of anti-capitalist climate politics. He studies the human condition in a time of accelerating ecological crisis, including how environmental damage and restoration intersect with the production of inequality and efforts to redistribute wealth and power. With Joshua Schuster, he is the author of Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). He has published articles about scale in relation to climate, film, and ecology in journals like New Formations and The Minnesota Review. With Karen Pinkus, he co-edited a special issue of diacritics on terraforming, which was the topic of an ICI colloquium organized by Alison Sperling in 2019. His other recent publications appear in journals like New Literary History, CR: The New Centennial Review, and Symplokē. Currently, Woods is completing a book manuscript about the ecosystem and earth system concepts entitled Trophic Time: A Media Theory of the Ecosystem. His other ongoing research takes up the cultural politics of symbiosis and eco-Marxist critiques of green technology/carbon markets. Before starting at McMaster, he worked in the Department of English at the University of British Columbia and the interdisciplinary Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.00:00
Introduction by Marietta Kesting06:24
Talk by Derek Wood
Scale Beyond Objects and Subjects:Experimental Protocols for a Theory of Scale
No full textConceptions of scale often start by assuming objects (which are at a scale or may change scales) or assuming subjects (who re-present or form scales). A different notion of scale, resolution, and science emerges when scale is considered independently from this presumption of objects and subjects. As a device for measuring variations, observations, and experience, scale tracks changes in the configurations of objects, actors, and subjects specifically in relation to units of space and time. When these units of space and time exceed those generated by an observing apparatus — especially the ones called ‘human’— scale enables to cross thresholds of intelligibility in new and astonishing ways. Untangling the disorienting results of these extensions require some experimental protocols for reorienting how the very human, non-scalar concepts, language, and practices operate. This talk will dwell in the simplicity, even naivete of the widely assumed sense of scale. It will consider two thought experiments that DiCaglio calls ‘experiential origins of scale’, and explore how they generate a need for scale. DiCaglio will unpack a few provocations that arise from this notion of scale discussing how they reorient towards foundational philosophical assumptions. Specifically, he will discuss 1) what constitutes an object if an object can also be many things depending on the scale and 2) who is the subject that scales? Joshua DiCaglio received a PhD in English (rhetoric of science) and currently is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. His work travels through the tangles of some intractable rhetorical practices, starting with bewildering aspects of science and finding itself, somewhat by accident, in the domain of mysticism. Along the way, he has published on environmental communication, rhetoric of science, and rhetorical theory with some side forays ranging from technical writing to science fiction. His first book, Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), outlines a theoretical basis for and implications of scale, in the sense of the significant shifts in size from the quantum to the cosmic. An edited collection following up on this project, entitled Visions of Scale: Art and the Technoscientific Universe, is under contract with Bloomsbury. This collection gathers together 18 artists, writers, and critics to examine artistic responses to the scalar conceptions of science. DiCaglio has published essays in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Configurations, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Science Fiction Studies, and Environmental Communication. His next project, tentatively entitled ‘The Sustainability Paradox: Lithium and the Ecologies of Scalar Objects’ uses lithium as a figure for examining the many challenges and contradictions that arise in our attempt to adjust our planetary structures to ecological relations.00:00 Introduction by Marietta Kesting04:06 Talk by Joshua DiCaglio58:18 Discussio
Kesting Considers Bjorling in Historical Perspective, as One of the Twentieth Century\u27s Key Tenors after Caruso
No full textJurgen Kesting is a prominent German music critic and author of· the monumental three-volume Die grossen Sanger as well as of highly original studies of Callas and Pavarotti
Performing history/ies with obsolete media: the example of a South African photo-film
No full textThe article addresses the tension between old (analogue) media and new (digital) media usage and their specific materialities by discussing the question of the preserving and re-telling of (subjective and national) history and histories. It analyses Pied Piper’s Voyage (2014), a photo-film of emerging South African artist Lebohang Kganye in the context of the South African photographic and filmic archive. In order to address the question of agentiality and transmission of memory through media this article interrogates the strategies of this piece, using a “hand-made” or analogue aesthetic in a high-definition video, and focuses on how the usage of obsolete media formats resonates both with the artists’ own subjective history and with the (chrono-)politics of representation and in/visibility in South Africa’s transnational history—including the often absent photo and film archive of black South Africans’ lives under apartheid and thus the negotiation of cultural memory in the present. It asks how media technology performs historicity: how can outdated formats invoke or announce pastness? Which different temporalities can they project? What desires and “atmospheres” may they create by staging or presenting “auratic” qualities
Archive queeren? : prekäre Sichtbarkeiten und instabile Erzählungen in filmischen Post-Apartheid-Erinnerungsräumen
No full textDer Beitrag befasst sich anhand von künstlerischen Arbeiten von Bettina Malcomess mit prekären Sichtbarkeiten und instabilen Narrativen im audiovisuellen Post-Apartheid-Archiv. Dabei werden das Nachwirken von Imperialismus und Apartheid in Südafrika und Strategien der Dekolonialisierung in künstlerischen Praktiken thematisiert
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